On the morning of 24 February 2022, Anastasiia Klysakova sent an SMS to Angels Initiative global project lead Jan van der Merwe in Germany. Jan was also the founder of the schools-based stroke awareness project, FAST Heroes, which the agency OneHealth was implementing in Ukraine.
Jan and Anastasiia were due later that day to give a joint 20-minute presentation to Ukrainian business leaders that they had rehearsed the day before. But in her SMS Anastasiia wrote that the presentation could not go ahead. Hours earlier Russia had launched airstrikes against the cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro, and now Russian troops were invading the country from the north, east, and south.
The presentation would have to wait, for how long she couldn’t say, because Ukraine was at war.
In Kraków, a miracle
In June 2024 Anastasiia and OneHealth director Natalia Olbert-Sinko are in Kraków, Poland, for the third annual FAST Heroes Teachers Summit and Awards. By now Ukraine is grinding through a third year of fighting. Civilian casualties have been on the rise since March amid escalating hostilities. More than 35,000 innocent people have been killed or injured, the official statistics say. There are 2,000 children among the casualties. The actual numbers will be more devastating by far.
But in Kraków, a miracle. An elementary school in Kharkiv tops the FAST Heroes leaderboard for the second year running. In the language of the campaign – having earned points for educating their parents about stroke, completing the e-books and beating their personal best in the online games, the children attending Kharkiv Elementary School #33 have distinguished themselves as the world’s leading FAST Heroes.
Natalia takes us behind the scenes of the production of a song-and-dance video the seven- and eight-year-olds in class 2-B shared with the FAST Heroes community last year after also clinching the award for best class:
The Kharkiv region had been under daily shelling by Russian forces since February 2022. If a school building had no air raid shelter, children studied online. To shoot the video, the agency had to find a location that could simultaneously serve as a studio, a shelter and rehearsal space. Parents needed their arms twisted, but their respect and affection for the class teacher Ms Elena Roskoshenko decided the matter. The sounds of explosions were edited out of the final video.
Teachers want to teach
Teachers are the heroes of the story Natalia and Anastasiia share on the morning of the awards. Knowing from the start that to implement FAST Heroes they would need a network of teachers, they partnered with a trusted education NGO, Osvitoriya, to find and train their first 50 teacher-ambassadors.
Making teachers the focus of their campaign turned out to be a winning strategy. “Many teachers in Ukraine are older,” Natalia explains. “Like all teachers they need to be reminded to take care of themselves as well as others. Stroke is an important topic as many of them had cases in their families.”
The reverence in which teachers are held in Ukraine is a strategic advantage. Besides that, “teachers want to teach, and we help them to teach”, Natalia says.
It is telling that many of the teachers who first signed up as ambassadors in 2021 are still part of the campaign.
“After fulfilling their initial contract some teachers sign up for a second or third year,” Anastasiia says. “They don’t have to, but they do because they like it, and there’s an opportunity to implement it in a new class. Once you’ve completed the programme it is part of your DNA.”
“Our teachers are innovators,” Natalia adds. “They like something that is new and different. It is important for them to be first, then others follow.”
It’s Diffusion of Innovation theory in action. By the time the war started, 3,395 teachers had registered with the campaign and 38,410 children had completed the programme. At the conclusion of the fourth wave in August 2024, these numbers had grown to 6,266 teachers and 65,437 children.
Back to work
Ukraine is among the best educated countries in the world and education is an important topic for Ukrainian society, Natalia says. Immediately after war broke out schools remained closed for two weeks. Then, whether from a village in the mountains or the relative safety of a city in western Ukraine, the country’s teachers gathered their wits and went back to work.
They found that some of their learners had been scattered to the four winds. In the months following the invasion seven million mostly mothers and children were evacuated, four million of whom remain abroad.
Even those who attend schools in their new countries do their Ukrainian lessons remotely after school.
The teachers, too, are lifelong learners from whom earning education credits is mandatory. Natalia and Anastasiia have applied for certification of the FAST Heroes programme and expect that the opportunity to earn credits will encourage participation, but it’s really about respecting teachers’ needs, Anastasiia says. Once on board, it will be the programme content that locks them in.
Lifelong learning
Natalia and Anastasiia are themselves products of the Ukrainian passion for education. Originally from Stryi, a city near Lviv in western Ukraine, fierce patriot Natalia obtained her masters degree in Political Science from the highly ranked National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. It’s one of the oldest schools in Eastern Europe, dating back to 1615, but it was closed by Tsar Alexander I in 1817 and reopened after the fall of the USSR in 1991.
“What I learnt most at university is critical thinking and how to deliver a message,” she says. She has become a specialist in communication and capacity building related to healthcare education and reform. She and her husband have made their home outside Kyiv for the past 20 years.
To the awards ceremony she wears a dress by a young Ukrainian designer, in a conscious expression of love for her country.
Anastasiia’s hometown is in Crimea, a temporarily occupied territory since 2014 that is now used as a base from which to attack mainland Ukraine. She has been home a few times since annexation – for her mother’s birthday, her stepfather’s funeral – but the peninsula has been inacessible since the full-scale invasion.
Anastasiia got her masters degree in economic theory in Kharkiv and her MBA in Kyiv. After the war began she moved to western Ukraine, staying for a while in Natali’s childhood bedroom, before evacuating to Vienna. She moved back to Kyiv in 2023 but is now back in Vienna where she pursues her next master’s degree, about cross-disciplinary strategies in the arts. She’s been coordinator of the FAST Heroes campaign in Ukraine for the past three years.
A new life
Natalia and Anastasiia realized soon after the invasion that the community of teachers they’d created needed help processing the shock and anxiety caused by war. So for a time teacher webinars focused on mental health and Angels consultant Tamara Zabashta’s background in psychology came in handy. “We’d get everyone together to talk about mental health, to support our community,” Natalia says.
The positive emotions associated with the FAST Heroes curriculum may also have helped children cope with the stress of war, Anastasiia speculates. “Research has shown that stress makes it very hard to teach and learn. But it also makes you strive even more – when you want to live so much, you try extra hard,” she says. She thinks it’s likely that the gamification and interactivity that characterize the programme serve as a distraction. “While you’re playing games in the shelter you can forget for a moment what goes on outside.”
Not everyone who watches the video of Kharkiv’s world-beating elementary schoolers will understand what the situation is really like for this school, Natalia says. “To have results like these in these conditions takes ten times more effort.”
But it is, in the end, a programme that gives back to those who invest in it. They recently met a teacher in her fifties from occupied Dombas who’d moved to western Ukraine after losing her house in the war. Arriving in an unfamiliar region, this teacher needed to find a job and a place in the community. So she applied to become a FAST Heroes teacher-ambassador.
“When we interview ambassadors we always ask what is motivating them,” Natalia says. “This teacher understood that FAST Heroes was very important to children, important to society and important to her. She could help the children and we could help her. With our programme she could start a new life.”
